By the time Georgia O'Keeffe died in 1986, she had long since become the grande dame of American art. In part, she owed that distinction to her longevity and the elegant austerity of her physical presence. It also stemmed from her marriage to photographer Alfred Stieglitz, who had played such a central role in the advent of modernism in this country. But above all, she owed her ascendance to the quality of her own work. For although she had embraced modernism early on, she was never a mere imitator of other avant-garde artists. Instead, her compositions, which drew much of their inspiration from the desert landscape around her home in New Mexico, were strictly her own, and today she is widely recognized as one of the most original painters of her era.

O'Keeffe sat for this portrait at sculptor Una Hanbury's studio in Santa Fe, New Mexico. The British-born Hanbury aimed in her portraits to reveal something of the inner nature of her subjects. In O'Keeffe's case, however, she confessed, "I never did get behind that painter's distance and impenetrability."